Alumni Profile

Curry Jones's work with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is motivated by a desire to keep communities and their environments safe and healthy. As a water quality specialist in Dallas, Texas, Curry Jones oversees the formation of water quality plans that reduce pollution in rivers, lakes, and streams across the Southwest. Water pollution can raise the level of bacteria and parasites in the water, making swimming and recreation unsafe. Pollutants also accumulate in fish and aquatic wildlife, disturbing the natural ecosystem and introducing toxic chemicals into our food supply. "You can consider what I do, if you were thinking about public health, as a kind of a secondary care," Jones says. "Because when we clean up waters, we reduce the potential for people to get sick."

Water is the lifeblood that supports all of our communities, providing us food, safe drinking water, and a haven to enjoy lazy summer days. But pollutants can lead to surging bacteria levels in the water. Water-borne Escherichia coli often cause gastrointestinal illness, while parasites may cause skin infections like swimmer's itch. Pollutants can also decimate natural ecosystems and poison our food supply—heavy metals and organic pollutants like mercury or PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) accumulate in fish and aquatic animals, leading to a reduction of aquatic life and toxic chemicals in our food.

When a lake or river is polluted, the state has to come up with a reasonable way to reduce the pollution. That's where Curry comes in. His job is to work with state agencies to make sure that the plans developed by the states are technically accurate and will be able to protect human health and water quality standards. Sometimes this means devising a plan to remove pollutants left by past generations. (For instance, the Northwest has a history of gold mining, which released mercury into our water supply). Other times, the water plan mandates changes in industry practices of dumping pollutants.

For the industry, that can mean many different things. Sometimes "it requires as little as them making minor adjustments to the way they operate their facility, or it can cost upwards of a couple of hundred millions of dollars to put in a new treatment system to meet new standards. It varies widely," Jones says.

Jones initially became interested in public health and environmental pollutants after witnessing the impact of pollution close to his home in Houston, Texas. In a nearby neighborhood (Kennedy Heights), a cluster of people developed lupus. The community started investigating and found that the entire neighborhood had been built on an industrial waste site. But, because the community was pitted against "deeper pockets," Curry says, they lost their battle for compensation. "That really helped me think about how I could work to prevent those kinds of things. At that point I decided to pursue public health."

Curry has been working in public health since college, when he researched water quality in Caddo Lake, in East Texas. Since 1994 he has worked for the EPA, first in Seattle, then in Atlanta, and now in Dallas. For Curry, one of the most rewarding parts of his job is solving the technical challenges of each clean-up project. "I really like to get people to think outside the box on the solutions that we come up with. Sometimes you have to use a toolbox, an array of different approaches to get you where you need to be," Jones says.

Cleaning up polluted waterways can take years. But for Curry, protecting public health isn't about quick fixes¾it's about persistent, incremental work to ensure that communities will be safer in the long run. "Any time you can come up with a plan and see that plan actually implemented, it gives you some assurances that over time, there'll be improvements in water quality," Curry says. "Most of the things we do to fix environmental damage take time and money. But it's been really rewarding."